Nick Sanderson of Audley Retirement Villages urges pensioners to think about different options to long-term care.

With increasing life expectancy, those over 60 can look forward to spending longer in retirement than any generation preceding them. This is cause for celebration, but as the recent intense debate on long term care has shown, it poses many difficult questions for society. While this community is healthier and wealthier than ever before, for many there is real uncertainty around how to provide for their future, specifically related to different health needs and increased risk of dependency.

The Dilnot Commission on Funding of Care and Support attracted much needed attention to the way in which long term care is provided with it clear that in the future responsibility for funding later life care will fall on the individual.

Notwithstanding the lack of policy response, the Commissions recommendations were vital for the attention focussed on issues relating to ageing. However, the debate it generated was flawed because it considered only how we fund the existing model of care. This is an entirely broken model because it positions institutional care as the only way of providing for later life health needs. No one, whatever their age, wants to live in institutional care.

Instead of making recommendations on how to pay for the existing model of later life care, it is time both the government and the industry invested in improving the housing and care options available. These options need to reflect the lifestyles that older people want to have, and above all keep them independent and in control of their future. It requires innovation in the housing options available so for example, people could stay in control of their front door, while having the additional care needed come to them, as and when they need it.

At the same time, we have to raise awareness of the options available and improve how we provide support and education. This will ensure older people, just as at every other stage of their life, can make the informed decisions they need. Effectively, we will support older people to take control of their future rather than waiting for a crisis when the decisions about how their care needs are met, and hard-won financial assets used, will be taken by others.

The opportunity to achieve significant change in how we provide for later life relies on empowering those over 60 to take action about their future and how they want to live in later life. In part the solution rests on how this group use their largest asset, their home. They are the generation to be majority homeowners, estimated collectively to hold over one trillion pounds in equity yet too many live in relative poverty with their assets frozen within property.

If we improve the housing options available, more older people would consider living in housing designed specifically for their future needs rather than staying in properties that become only increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain. High-quality housing set in beautiful settings are just as much a right for older people as younger people. The difference is that if we support more older people to downsize, it would not only enable them to live a happier, healthier later life but also free up valuable housing stock and inject finance into the stagnating housing sector.

The government has to work with the financial services, housing and social care industries to transform how we consider later life. It requires a new way of thinking about the future that encourages candid, open conversations on peoples ambitions for retirement and how we best meet them. The answer relies on a step change in approach. If we get it right, it will mean a happier, more fulfilling older age not just for this current generation of over 60s but for us all.

By Nick Sanderson, chairman of the Association of Retirement Villages and chief executive of Audley Retirement Villages

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Retirement must be about independence